IBM and Novell announce support for open-source identity manager

IBM and Novell announced today that they are lending support to an open-source …

IBM announced today that they are partnering with Novell and a small firm called Parity Communications to contribute time and code to "Project Higgins," an open-source on-line identity manager.

Higgins started life in 2004 as the "Eclipse Trust Framework," a proposal by the Eclipse Project. Eclipse is a nonprofit, open-source development organization, best known for its set of integrated, Java-based development tools. The idea behind the Eclipse Trust Framework (which was renamed Higgins last year) was to create an application programming interface (API) that could be used by users and organizations to create identity and relationship profiles that work across multiple platforms and systems.

For example, after a single authentication, all of a corporate user's web browsing and application use would have access to the same resources. Existing communications systems (such as the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), the Web Services Policy Framework, and even e-mail and instant messaging) can be integrated into the Higgins Trust Framework.

The idea of a single, trusted, sign-in that keeps track of everything has been one of computing's holy grails for many years. In 2001, Microsoft announced a large-scale initiative called "Hailstorm" that was intended to provide, among other things, seamless identity management, hosted on Microsoft's MSN servers. However, lukewarm reactions and concerns about privacy from third parties caused Hailstorm to quickly melt. Today, parts of it still exist as the Microsoft's Passport authentication service, but it is used only by Microsoft applications such as Hotmail.

With Windows Vista, Microsoft plans to ship a new platform called InfoCard, which differs from the Passport scheme by storing the user's digital identity card on the user's PC, rather than on a central Microsoft server. Bundling with Vista will quickly create a large installed base of InfoCard users, something which IBM and Novell hope to forestall by lending their assistance to the Higgins Project.

Will Higgins compete directly with InfoCard in the battle for user authentication? Not necessarily, says Anthony Nadalin, chief security architect at IBM:

"We are not here to create another identity system; we are here to aggregate the existing systems," Nadalin said. "We have invited Microsoft to participate...and we will continue to work with Microsoft to integrate with InfoCard. We think that has to happen."

Certainly Higgins will be useful for organizations that wish to integrate heterogeneous identity servers over multiple platforms. While the project is still only at Milestone 0.2.0, the addition of programming help from IBM and Novell will help the project pick up speed and prominence. The only thing left to wonder about is the name. While the website insists that it is named after the Tasmanian long-tailed Higgins mouse (reflecting a "long tail" of smaller markets), I spent the entire time writing this article trying to get the image of Magnum, P.I.'s sidekick out of my head. But then again I had a similar issue with Chandler, so perhaps the problem is just me.